Dummy Linux user for installing programs

Question

I have a separate home partition, so I want to install some software from source in a different hierarchy – not in my user account, preferably in /home.

To rephrase, let's say I have my home directory in /home/myuser and I want my new hierarchy (i.e. /bin, /lib, /include, /share, /local, /src nested in a dummy user's directory – say /home/myprograms so that all the software I install from source or just want to install away from /usr can reside in a separate directory.

I can install programs in that directory, but how do I make those programs available to all users on my PC?

If anyone has a different suggestion for maintaining two hierarchies, please also leave a comment.

Answer 1

The convention for 3rd party programs is to install them under /usr/local which is will make them available to other users (on most distributions).

You could of course use any other directory such as /home/myuser, but you'll have to update the PATH environment variable. You can do this by creating /etc/profile.d/mypath.sh with the following content:

PATH="/home/myuser/bin:$PATH"

Another choice would be installing them under /opt using a subdirectory for each program like this: /opt/foo/{bin,lib,share}, /opt/bar/{bin,lib,share} and so on. This has the advantage of being able to quickly remove or copy a program's installation, but it has the disadvantage of having everything split up into multiple places, so you'll have to add multiple directories to PATH.

For more details read the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.